How to reduce the verbosity of the MSBuild workflow activity?

Question

Here is an example of what I have today:

And it remains the same regardless of the value passed to the Verbosity parameter.

Is there a way to reduce this clutter?

We are using TFS 2015.

Answer 1

In a build process that is based on the Default Template or the Upgrade Template, you can use the Logging Verbosity build process parameter to manage the verbosity of the information that is logged and stored. The following table lists the Logging Verbosity values and their corresponding effects: More details please refer this link: Manage Build Information and Control Verbosity

---

If you are using a custom build template . Suggest you to use minimal Verbosity When Designing a Custom Build Process Template

Users of your build process rely on verbosity filtering to reduce information overload. You can help make this filtering more effective by taking the following measures: Best Practice: Set Verbosity as Low as Possible

Answer 2

These are basically the targets that MSBuild compiles, and as I experienced, it cannot really be controlled with the verbosity.

Our solution was to use custom activity to run the build (we have a wrapper), where we did not pass the TFS logger parameter to the MSBuild.

However in such a case you should consider that the MSBuild task can run for long time, and your custom activity should be cancellable. In this topic I can suggest to read the below article:

https://devtfs.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/dealing-with-long-running-activities/

You may also want to show the compiled targets somehow, therefore you might need to write your own custom MSBuild Logger and a UI to show the result as well.